Jazz and Pop, Youth and Middle Age like Young

Observing the scene around McCoy Tyner at Penn's Landing this summer, a stranger to Philadelphia might have thought that being a jazz
fan there was a patronage job. Everybody lining up to shake the pianist's
hand as he made his way from his trailer to the stage seemed to be related
to a jazz giant by blood or marriage, or to have taken auto shop with one
in high school. It was as though not to pay respects to Tyner would have
been a serious breech of protocol that could have resulted in immediate
dismissal from the local jazz community.

Things are different in New York, where the fifty-eight-year-old Tyner
lives now and where audiences seem more aware that giants need their
space. A few years ago, when Tyner was performing with his trio in
Greenwich Village, the latecomers to his final set one evening included
Reggie Workman, a bassist who played alongside him in John Coltrane's
rhythm section in the early 1960s, but whose relationship with Tyner
went back even further, to when both were growing up in Philadelphia.
(Workman often traveled from his parents' home in the Germantown
section to Tyner's mother's beauty shop, on the corner of May and
Fairmount Streets, in North Philadelphia, for late-night jam sessions.)
Workman hoped to touch base with Tyner after the set—as did a writer
working on a Coltrane biography, who was sitting at the same table.

What proved to be the final tune ended with a long, sliding bass solo
by Avery Sharpe, accompanied by only an occasional cymbal tap by the
drummer Aaron Scott. Surprisingly, Tyner never returned to the bandstand to take the tune out. As Sharpe zipped up his bass and Scott tight‐

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